Print quality is an important feature for printers of all types. The combination of the marking material, such as ink or toner, and the type of media being printed can have a significant effect on print quality. To address these different combinations, printers typically utilize different print processes that are optimized for particular types of media. The type of media being used, such as plain paper, transparencies, etc., may be sensed automatically by the printer or inputted by the user through the printer driver. With the media type information, the printer automatically selects the appropriate print process that is best suited for that media. The print process typically includes image processing techniques, such as halftoning, and other print parameters that are not accessible to a user.
Many printers also offer several user-selectable print quality settings, such as Draft, Normal and Best. An operator may select from the various print quality settings according to the quality and print speed desired. A default setting, such as Normal, is typically used whenever the user does not manually input a print quality setting. Given that printing speed generally decreases as print quality increases, the default print quality setting is a compromise between print quality and speed that is intended to meet the requirements of a range of printing requests.
In some common printing situations an operator would prefer to consistently use a print quality setting other than the default setting. For example, when printing email documents an operator may always desire to use a Draft print quality for maximum speed. Or when printing photographs the operator may desire to use a Best print quality setting for maximum quality.
In many current printers, to modify the print quality setting the user must open a printer driver dialog box and select a different setting. This process sometimes requires a user to click through multiple screens. Other printers allow the print quality setting to be adjusted via a keypad or touchscreen on the printer. Many users are either unaware of this print quality selection feature or do not take the additional time necessary to change these settings. For users who do utilize this capability, the time involved to manually change the default print quality setting slows the printing process.
It has also been discovered that offering a high number of print quality choices from which a user must manually select makes the printer more difficult to operate.
Additionally, the increasing need to print from personal appliances, such as cell phones and PDA's, presents new challenges to traditional print quality selection models. For example, the user interface in many appliances is not equipped to offer multiple quality levels, and a single default print quality setting is used for all print requests.
Thus, a need exists for an intelligent print quality selection system and method that address the limitations of the prior art.